of Organizations By/For People Who Use Drugs
Unite to Fight
For Harm Reduction, an End to the Failed Drug War
and Justice and Liberation for our Communities!
The shocking numbers – over 16,000 deaths just in B.C. and over 50,000 Canada-wide since Provincial Health Officer Perry Kendall declared a public health emergency in 2016 in response to rising drug overdoses and the toxic illicit drug supply – cannot convey the grief and loss in our communities and the anger at the continued failure to adequately address the emergency.
We’ve lost children, parents, siblings, aunties, co-workers, neighbours, friends, spouses, lovers, and comrades to preventable deaths that are the direct and predictable consequence of the war on drugs. Indeed, now more Canadians have died in this toxic drugs and overdose crisis than died in the Second World War.
In this ongoing crisis the response of governments has been totally inadequate. The vast maior\ty of spending by all levels still goes to the failed drug war strategy of criminalization, enforcement and punishment. It’s the approach that created the crisis in the first place as criminalization and supply side interventions have generated a huge lucrative market, and the big criminalized drug industry bosses take advantage of increasing demand to get richer, introducing new, more profitable, and in many cases more dangerous products like fentanyl, crystal meth and cocktails with increasing strong contaminants and additives. Caught between ineffective and counterproductive government policy, and an unregulated, profit-maximizing criminalized drug industry, working class, Indigenous, Black and Brown communities are paying the price.
Federally 58% of expenditure for the Canadian Drugs and Substances Strategy continues to go to enforcement while only 8% goes to harm reduction. . And that doesn’t include the vast sums spent on police enforcement of the drug war and on the incarceration of thousands of people for drug or drug related offences.
Meanwhile, the strategy of B.C.’s provincial government has been no strategy. They’ve moved from one under-resourced intervention to the next – overdose prevention sites & naloxone, to safer supply, to decriminalization, back to criminalization and the to detox and treatment – without any coherent plan and without putting hte kind of serious resources or action behind these efforts appropriate to an emergency situation. In practice they declared an emergency and then treated it as an ‘issue’ to be managed.
Most recently, the provincial government is signalling acceptance of the right wing narrative, pushed heavily by the federal Conservatives, billionaires in the Save Our Streets coalition, and the corporate media that ‘harm reduction has failed’, and shifted its focus to enforcement and fake ‘solutions’ like involuntary treatment, while backing out of decriminalization, gutting safer supply ,cracking down on community initiatives like the Drug User Liberation Front compassion club, reducing access to harm reductions supplies and scrapping the Ministry of Mental Health and Addictions.
To say that harm reduction measures have failed is like saying that masking, handwashing and social distancing failed to be effective responses to COVID because over 50,000 people died from COVID-19 in Canada. In fact, in both instances it is clear that public health interventions significantly reduce the number of deaths.
While there is no vaccine or ‘quick fix’ for this public health emergency, we urgently need scaled up access to overdose prevention, safer supply, and voluntary and evidence based detox and treatment.
Throughout the crisis, and around the province, grassroots organizations of people who use illicit drugs have been doing our best to keep our community members alive. With tiny dribbles of government funding we have been running overdose prevention sites, distributing harm reduction supplies and information, helping people navigate the complex health care, detox and treatment system (such as it is\), and working to combat stigma and oppression of people who use drugs in our communities and neighbourhoods.
Will policy makers and elected officials continue to drift from one half-assedly implemented policy to another while a whole generation dies? Or worse yet, implement a mass forced treatment regime that costs billions despite the evidence suggesting that it actually leads to worse outcomes?
Or will they work with drug user groups and communities targeted by the drug war to develop and implement a coherent strategy to reduce the harms associated with drug use, dismantle the failed drug war, and begin addressing the root causes of addiction and problem substance use?
If we want the latter we need to build our organization and power. We need a real movement with strong roots and a clear vision. If you are interested in helping to build such a movement, or if you are a person who uses drugs trying to organize in your community, please reach out to the BC Coalition of Organizations By/For People Who Use Drugs at bccoalitionopwud@gmail.com.
♦ No More Drug War!
♦ Harm Reduction Saves Lives!
♦ Drug Users and Criminalized Communities Unite for Liberation!
BC Coalition of Organizations By/For People Who Use Drugs
Email The Coalition: bccoalitionopwud@gmail.com
April 14, 2025 Statement
9 Years of Crisis in BC, Toxic Drugs, Toxic Policy
